Navigation systems are used by people and vehicles for routing and directions in order to travel between two locations. Navigation systems require accurate traffic information to properly route vehicles. When roads include multiple modes of transportation, traffic estimation may be difficult.
Traffic service providers may use probes to acquire traffic information. If probes are handled naively without any investigation into the sources of the probes, errors in traffic speed estimation may be introduced. Apart from intrinsic errors that arise from positional accuracy, there may be errors introduced by probes from other transportation modes. For example, averaging probes from bikes or pedestrians with vehicles may cause errors in estimating traffic condition. Errors may be prevalent in probes sourced from smartphones in which the data does not indicate if the user is driving or walking or running. More information collected with probes may be beneficial, but if the information cannot be identified or classified as coming from a known source, the additional information may not be useful, but rather detrimental to estimating traffic patterns.